The Internet has grown in popularity largely because it provides a simple and uniform underlying packet protocol for exchanging data that in turn enables more complex applications to occur. The relative simplicity of the Internet has lead to an explosion of growth in data traffic for business and personal usage. An industry of Internet service providers (ISP) has developed to provide access to the Internet for businesses and homes. These ISPs have invested heavily in infrastructure with the general goal of improving data transfer rates for customer end points. Thus, ISPs have evolved from low speed analog modem Internet connections provided through dial-up service across the plain old telephone system (POTS) into broadband access provided by cable modems, DSL, and ADSL that are capable of transferring data at substantially higher rates.
Internet access offered by ISPs has become a commodity service with different ISPs typically offering similar access speeds and competing on price points. However, as ISPs gain subscribers to their high-speed broadband access services, the reliability of ISP service, i.e. the ability to transfer data at predictable rates, available at end points has suffered and indeed is often less than the capacity of broadband customer modems. For instance, surges in subscriber use tends to create bottlenecks that slow data transfer rates and use ISP infrastructure inefficiently. This difficulty relates generally to the Internet's architecture which transfers data on a “best effort” basis in which TCP/IP packets are generally transferred between routing points without prioritization. This “best effort” architecture is attractive for its simplicity, but creates difficulties for ISPs who desire to distinguish themselves based on the services offered compared to other ISPs.
One manner in which ISPs are working to distinguish themselves is to offer subscribers different types of services. In general terms, a service is the processing of certain data on the network in a predetermined manner with associated billing. For instance, one service typically offered by telephone network providers is call waiting, in which customers receive notice of an incoming telephone call when the customer is on the phone for a monthly fee. A typical service offered by ISPs is e-mail service, although e-mail service is not typically billed. Typically e-mail service is provided by routing e-mails to an ISP server that stores the e-mails until the subscriber retrieves them.
More complex services are generally difficult to implement on a best effort network architecture, such as the Internet, since best effort networks are generally designed to route packets to destinations on a first come first served basis. An ISP that seeks to provide a new service to its subscribers has to design and install hardware and software that generally require a considerable capital investment and time to develop. Even after investing considerable time and capital in the development of a new service, subscriber needs and technology often advance more rapidly than a service deployment cycle, frequently leaving newly deployed services out of date before the services become a revenue source or market differentiator for the ISP. Thus, ISPs who attempt to lead the market by developing and offering new services face considerable risk if a large investment in a new service fails to result in greater revenue or customer satisfaction.